Please digg and help me find this interview…

If someone could help me out, I am looking for an interview I recall Zuckerberg did where he claimed they had a joke inside Facebook that ‘we can guess who will get into a relationship based on variables’. I won’t venture to guess the success rate they had, but it was impressive.

This interview was done a while ago, and leads me to wonder just what algorithms Facebook uses internally to track their users. Then we hear things like this:

Again, from the Web 2.0 Sumitt:

Battelle pounced, asking Zuckerberg to define the “social graph,” a term that Google CEO Eric Schmidt and others with interests in social networking have bandied about in recent months.

Noting that there is quite a bit of misperception about how Facebook thinks about the social graph, Zuckerberg said it is the set of connections—including business connections, friendships and acquaintances—that everyone has in the world.

“All that we’re trying to do at Facebook is take the social graph that exists in the world and map it out,” Zuckerberg said.

“Once we have an accurate model of the social graph, then what we can do is expose those connections in a way that our users are comfortable with,” he said. Then Facebook will let users link “to a set of applications, and those applications can use the connections to help people use information more effectively,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg claims they do not have an accurate model of the social graph, and they will do what they can to ‘expose those connections in a way [users] are comfortable with’… to the public. Again, I am more interested in how users’ data is being exposed and exploited inside the company.

Back to that joke: If they have an algorithm to guess relationships based on variables such as profile views, picture views, pokes, wall-to-wall posts, and number of messages back and forth as an internal joke, what kind of applications are they writing for real?

There’s not much we can do except take our own information out of their social graph, we put it there.